Biography of S. E. Leinbach

S. E. Leinbach. Fifty years have passed since Mr. Leinbach became a resident of Kansas. He arrived in Pottawatomie County as a pioneer not long after the close of the Civil war, in which he had played a gallant part as a Union soldier. The war was the first great event in his life and his settlement in Kansas the second. Mr. Leinbach developed a homestead and had since acquired a large body of the fertile and valuable soil of Pottawatomie County. He is now living at Onaga and had been a public spirited factor in the progress of that community since the pioneer spoeh.

Mr. Leimbach’s ancestors came out of Germany and settled in Pennsylvania as early as 1716. Since early times the family lived in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, where S. E. Leinbach was born April 7, 1841, and where his father, Daniel Leinbach, was born in April, 1809. Daniel Leinbach married ‘Lydia Stitzel, also of German ancestry. She was bora in Northumberland County in 1811. Both of them died in the same year, 1840, victims of typhoid fever. Daniel Leinbach was a miller by trade and occupation, and owned a flour mill at McEwensville, Pennsylvania. He was a democrat and he and his wife were members of the German Reformed Church. S. E. Leinbach was the fifth in a family of five children, and he and all his brothers were Union soldiers. The oldest, Henry, enlisted and served in a Pemnsylvania regiment, from there moved out to Iowa, and finally to South Dakota, and after many years as a farmer he died in the latter state at the age of sixtyfive. Sarah, the second child, and the older daughter, married Mr. Smith and died in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1907. William was a veteran of the Civil war and afterwards a hotel proprietor and died in Chicago, Illinois, in 1911. Theodore was in the Sixth Michigan Cavalry, lost his right arm in service, but afterwards became a successful farmer and owned a large place ten miles southeast of Onaga, Kansas. He died at Onaga In March, 1917. Mary, the younger child, lives at Linden, Kansas, the widow of James Everett, who died on his farm ten miles southeast of Onaga in 1914.

S. E. Leinbach was five years of age when his parents died. After that he lived with his father’s sister Mrs. Mary Carver and grew up at McEwensville, where he was educated in the public schools. At the age of twenty, in 1861, he enlisted in the Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry as a private. He saw four years of service, not being mustered out until September 22, 1865, some weeks after the close of actual hostilities. His regiment was attached during most of the war to the Army of the Cumberland. Only a few of the battles and skirmishes in which he participated can be named. He was at Perryville, Kentucky, in 1862, at the close of that year fought at Stone River or Murfreesboro, in the next year was at Chickamaugs, and then did his part in the great Atlanta campaign. After the fall of Atlanta he returned with General Thomas’ army and was in the battles of Franklin and Nashville in the closing days of 1864.

After spending a year or so in Pennsylvania Mr. Leinbach came to Kansas in the spring of 1867. He was still unmarried and bought 160 acres in the vicinity where the city of Onaga was founded ten years later. He also homesteaded eighty acres adjoining the quarter seetion purchased. This land is in Vienna Township of Pottawatomie County two miles south of Onaga. He still owned his homestead and besides had 160 acres a mile west and another 160 acres a half mile north of the last mentioned tract. All of this is the result of his enterprise as a Kansas farmer and he is also a stockholder and director in the Citizens State Bank of Onaga.

Mr. Leinbach is a past commander of Onaga Post of the Grand Army of the Republic and a past master of Onaga Lodge No. 188, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons. Politically he had always voted as a republican, having cast his first ballot for Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

Five years after coming to Kansas and in Vienna Township of Pottawatomie County in 1872 Mr. Leinbach married Miss. Lucy M. Fulton, daughter of Joseph and Mary (Day) Fulton. Her father was one of the pioneer school teachers of Kansas, in which state he loeated in 1867. Mr. and Mrs. Leinbach have four children. Chester A. is a graduate of the University of Kansas and is now succesefully farming his father’s place a mile south of Onaga. Mary graduated at the State Normal at Emporia and for six years taught school, until she married Leon O’Meara. They now live on their farm a mile and a half sonth of Onaga. Florence, the second danghter, is a graduate of the State Normal School of Emporia and taught in the schools of Clay Center, where she now resided, the wife of Doctor Osterhoudt, a dentist. Boscoe C. is a graduate of the Emporia Normal School and of the Kansas Medieal College and is now successfully practicing as a physician and surgeon at Berryton, Kansas. Doctor Leinbach is unmarried.